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In the Orbit of Sancerre

Some of Sancerre's neighbors are more affordable.Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

EVERYBODY knows Sancerre. That’s a problem among some in the wine avant-garde, for whom familiarity breeds contempt. I have heard Sancerre sneered at as a sort of comfort food, signaling timidity in a cliquish world that sizes up personality and status by choice of beverage.

Why should wine be different? Other consumer objects (the phone you carry, the car you drive, the shoes you wear) connote important information about your character. Should wine?

I am dead set against the connotations game.

No doubt Sancerre is often ordered out of absent-minded laziness, the way many people ask for a glass of chardonnay. But I want to judge wine by what it is, not what it might represent. By that standard, Sancerre — good Sancerre — offers one of the purest, most complex and delicious expressions of the sauvignon blanc grape on the planet. I love it.

I don’t always love paying Sancerre prices, though. In the last 20 years, as the quality of viticulture and winemaking in the Loire Valley has risen, so have prices. What used to be an inexpensive bistro wine now generally costs a minimum of $25 for a good producer’s basic cuvée, and often $10 to $15 more.

One excellent solution is to shop Sancerre satellites, appellations within the orbit of Sancerre that also make sauvignon blanc wines. This primarily means Pouilly-Fumé, well known in its own right, but also the smaller Loire appellations of Menetou-Salon, Quincy and Reuilly.

Pouilly-Fumé in particular can be as racy and refreshing as good Sancerre, and at its best can display a similarly dazzling minerality that testifies to the felicitous combination of sauvignon blanc with chalk, flint and limestone soils. And with one notable superstar exception, they are generally at least a few dollars cheaper. The other appellations, while perhaps not as exalted as Pouilly-Fumé, can also be excellent sources of delicious wines.

The wine panel recently tasted 20 bottles from the Sancerre satellites. For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Jordan Salcito, the wine director of Crown on the Upper East Side, who will soon be leaving to join a new restaurant project, and André Compeyre, the wine director at Benoit in Midtown.

We were all highly pleased with the wines. Rather than exhibiting the pungent fruit flavors more typical in New Zealand sauvignon blancs, these were subtle, nuanced wines with an emphasis on citrus, herbal and mineral flavors. We did find a couple of flamboyant outliers, but this was due mostly to vintage variations.

Fourteen of the bottles came from Pouilly-Fumé, east of Sancerre on the opposite side of the Loire, with two each from Menetou-Salon, just west of Sancerre, and Quincy and Reuilly, both a little farther southwest. Of these, 13 bottles came from the excellent 2010 vintage; 4 were from 2011, an inconsistent year, and 3 from the very ripe 2009 vintage.

Let me take a moment for a public service reminder: Good wines change over time; blind tastings like this one are snapshots, recording quick impressions at a particular moment in their evolution. They are less useful for making sweeping statements about producers and their wines in comparison with one another.

For example, our No. 1 bottle was the fragrant, lively 2010 Cuvée le Charnay Menetou-Salon from Jean-Max Roger. I would love to drink this wine tonight. But does that mean Jean-Max Roger is the best producer among the 20 we tasted, or that Menetou-Salon is the best of these appellations?

No, that would be putting too much stock in a single tasting, when years of drinking wines from other producers and appellations in the region suggest otherwise. What can we reasonably conclude? Jean-Max Roger is a very good producer, worth following, and his ’10 Menetou-Salon is fresh and vivacious.

By contrast, our No. 5 wine was the ’09 Didier Dagueneau Blanc Fumé de Pouilly, the basic cuvée from an estate widely considered to be one of the world’s greatest producers of sauvignon blanc. Since Mr. Dagueneau died in a plane crash in 2008, the wines have been made by his son Louis-Benjamin Dagueneau, who has carried on his father’s work very well.

This bottle had some of the hallmarks of Dagueneau greatness — richness, density, complexity and texture — but lacked the usual sense of precision and focus, which most likely reflects the ’09 vintage.

In the context of this tasting, we preferred the Roger and three other bottles to the Dagueneau. But I would not conclude that those other producers make better or more thought-provoking wines than Dagueneau; only that 2009 does not show Dagueneau at the heights of its brilliance. As you might guess, I’m not a fan of the ’09s in general, which I find to be big, fruity and lacking the subtlety and balance of the 2010s.

By the way, the Dagueneau was by far the most expensive bottle in the tasting at $90. (I’ve seen it priced from $65 to $100.) Since all the other bottles on our list were $17 to $24, it testifies to the respect Dagueneau commands and the prices admirers are willing to pay.

While Dagueneau is for special occasions, excellent daily choices abound, like the 2010 Pouilly-Fumé from Michel Redde for $24, fresh, structured and vivacious, and the 2011 Pouilly-Fumé from Cédrick Bardin, lively and persistent with a sort of restrained pungence.

I was particularly impressed with the 2011 Pouilly-Fumé from Jonathan Pabiot, an up-and-coming producer whose wines I had not tried before. This wine, which divided the panel, seemed so transparent that it transcended the characteristics of the grape in favor of the terroir. If you had no idea what was in the glass, you might even think it was Chablis, where the soil is similar.

In the end, the proportion of appellations in our top 10 mirrored the tasting precisely, with seven Pouilly-Fumés and one each from Menetou-Salon, Reuilly and Quincy. Like the Dagueneau, the 2009 Domaine de Reuilly Les Pierres Plates showed the ripeness of the vintage, though the pungent citrus and herbal flavors were held in place by an underlying minerality. The 2010 Quincy came from Domaine Mardon, one of the most reliable producers in this small appellation.

What came through in the tasting was the vitality of both the wines and the region, the Kingdom of Sauvignon Blanc, as Jacqueline Friedrich calls it in Volume 1 of her fine recent book, “Earthly Delights From the Garden of France.” No matter how well you think you know the wines, they are worth knowing better.

WHAT THE STARS MEAN:
Ratings, up to four stars, reflect the panel’s reaction to the wines, which
were tasted with names and vintages concealed. The wines represent a selection
generally available in good retail shops and restaurants and on the
Internet. Prices are those paid in shops in the New York region. Tasting coordinator: Bernard Kirsch

A version of this review appears in print on August 15, 2012, on page D4 of the New York edition with the headline: In the Orbit of Sancerre. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe